When engaged in Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) development, it is nearly impossible to avoid legal issues and concerns. Every few lines of code written become subject to copyright. Patents seem to cover nearly any code a developer can write. Trademarks may already exist on potential project names for your exciting new codebase.

In FLOSS development, we’d all rather ignore these legal systems that impact our work, but we cannot. In this talk, a lawyer and a software developer team up to introduce the basics of what every developer should know about these legal systems. This presentation helps FLOSS hackers understand the parts of these legal systems that are most likely to effect them, in hopes that they can go about their work armed with the right knowledge and keep the legal details from getting in their way.

This talk will cover:

What copyrights are, how to properly mark your project with a FLOSS copyright license, and what issues should be considered when accepting copyrighted contributions from others.

How patents work, what a FLOSS developer should know about them, and those areas of development where patents are of most concern.

The details to consider when a project considers a new name, and what issues to discuss with your co-developers when considering applying for trademark.

People planning to attend this session also want to see:

Bradley Kuhn

Software Freedom Conservancy

Bradley M. Kuhn is the president and distinguished technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation, and editor-in-chief of Copyleft.org. Bradley began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system and began contributing to various free software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. His nonprofit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF’s executive director from 2001 to 2005, Bradley led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL.

Bradley was appointed president of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy’s primary volunteer from 2006 to 2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Bradley holds a summa cum laude BS in computer science from Loyola University in Maryland and an MS in computer science from the University of Cincinnati, where his master’s thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of free software programming languages. An excerpt from his thesis won the Damien Conway Award for Best Technical Paper at this conference in 2000. Bradley also received an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2012 in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. He has a blog, is on pump.io, and cohosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Karen Sandler

GNOME Foundation

Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Prior to joining GNOME, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC and serves as an officer of both the Software Freedom Conservancy and SFLC. Before joining SFLC, she worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union.